Content Calendar for Social Media

What is a social media content calendar for?

Have you ever felt like your ideas slip away, or worse, that you lose your inspiration?

Well, that happens due to a lack of organization and discipline, which ultimately leads to wasted time.

People who are just starting to manage social media make the serious mistake of thinking that any type of post will work.

The best way to avoid these roadblocks in our daily routine is by creating a social media content calendar.

So, use the following pillars as a reference to keep in mind when creating your calendar:

• What you should post.

  (Knowing what type of content we need to post).

• Where you should do it. (On which social networks we need to do it).

• When you are going to post it. (Knowing when it needs to be done).

Likewise, you specify what copy (advertising copywriting) you are going to create and the hashtags you will use for each post.

Now, let's see how to create the social media content calendar.

How to create a social media content calendar

With this model I'm proposing, you should follow these phases:

1. Social media analysis / audit.

2. Most important dates.

3. Target audience.

4. Goals

5. Content type.

6. Format

7. Copywriting and hashtags.

8. Schedule

Next, I'll walk you through each of these points.

1. Social media analysis / audit

The first step is to do a thorough analysis of your social media.

This analysis involves examining our profiles and our competitors' profiles. The main data points you should gather are the following:

• Which social networks perform best.
• What type of content generates the most engagement.
• What the posting frequency is.
• Which are the best-performing posts.

There are many tools to pull this information; I've used Hootsuite and Metricol, and the latter offers a free-for-life plan where you can register a single brand with its respective social networks.

2. What are the most important dates?

Every month has certain dates you should keep in mind. It's essential to know the most important dates. Example:

• New Year.
• Three Kings Day.
• Father's Day.
• Mother's Day.
• Children's Day.
• Friend's Day
• Etc.

3. Who is your target audience?

It's essential to know your target audience, since, depending on different segmentation variables, the type of post changes.

Here are some examples of segmentation variables:

• Age.
• Gender.
• Place of residence.
• Socioeconomic level.
• Etc.

To analyze the type of audience visiting your website, you need to access your Google Analytics account. There you can find the age, gender, and other variables of the people who visit you.

Likewise, check the analytics for each of your social networks. For example, Meta Business Manager for Facebook and Instagram.

If you have several networks, analyze them separately; each social network has a different age range. For example, Facebook has an older audience than Instagram.

4. What are your goals?

Once we've defined our marketing goal, we create a series of strategies to achieve it. And within those strategies we define the posts.

The goals are usually the following:

Branding. (Brand awareness)
Engagement. (Audience commitment to the brand)
Leads. (Potential customers)
Sales. (Performance)

5. What type of content?

Now we need to choose the type of content we're going to create. There are several types of content; here are some examples:

• Tips and advice
• Discounts
• Deals
• Tutorials
• Newsletter
• News
• Polls
• FAQs (Frequently asked questions)
• Blog rankings
• Making of
• Interviews
• Courses
• Templates
• Webinar
• Landing Page
• Contests
• Success stories
• Quotes

6. What type of formats?

Depending on the type of social network we use, formats tend to vary. Formats are usually:

• Text
• Images
• Videos
• Infographics
• Polls
• GIF
• LIVE

7. What copy and hashtags will we use?

Now we need to determine the copywriting you'll use in your posts.

This is very important because the copy (writing) is what makes people stop to look at your post. It's the first thing that catches the user's attention.

When writing ad copy on Facebook (or any other platform) it's essential to know the level of awareness.

It's not the same to speak to someone who knows what problem they have and is already looking for a solution as it is to speak to someone who hasn't even realized they have a problem.

It's often said that there are three main levels of awareness:

• They don't know the problem or the solution.
• They know their problem, but not the solution.
• They know their problem and the solution.

Understanding this is essential because it will shape how you approach your campaigns.

We choose which hashtags to use depending on the social network, not all of them include hashtags, and you should also be careful about how many you use

8. When are you going to post?

The last step will be to determine when you're going to post. Analyze the timing of your posts with the most engagement, pay attention to the hour.

I also recommend using the tools each platform provides; on Facebook for example, you can find all these statistics in the main menu of your Fan Page or in Meta Business Manager

Finally, also define a posting frequency. You'll get this data once you've done the analysis/audit of your competitors' social media. (first phase of the process).

And that's how you create a social media content calendar. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments.